On a Friday evening in mid-October, Jim was sitting in a subway train,
riding home. The daytime rush hour was just about over, and the nighttime
rush hour was not yet underway, so the subway car was not crowded. Jim grew
bored with the newspaper he'd been more or less reading and looked around
him at the other subway passengers. One in particular caught his eye.

She was a very attractive young woman, with long red hair, hair dark
and deep in color, a very rich shade of red. But it wasn't just her good
looks that attracted his notice; she was wearing a jacket that struck him
as being odd. It was a camouflage jacket, but instead of featuring blobs
of varying shades of green, her jacket had red, pink, and purple colored
blobs. It was like camouflage for use in the painted desert-or on the planet
Mars.

Just as Jim was trying to think of a way to strike up a conversation
with her, the subway screeched into the Zephyr Heights station, and she
disembarked.

After the subway had begun moving again, Jim realized that the girl had
inadvertently left something behind. He went over and retrieved a piece
of red paper from the molded plastic subway seat on which the girl had been
sitting. It was a half-sized sheet of paper, and on it were printed the
following words:

Meetings of the Children of Mars

are held at 11:00 PM

every Friday night

in New Xi City.

Behind the words was a faint image of what appeared to be the planet
Mars. Jim was immediately intrigued by this, and felt he had to find out
more about it, partly out of curiosity about this group and what they did,
and partly out of a desire to meet the attractive girl who had dropped the
flyer.